The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Macron, Merkel,
and European Union Foreign Policy Commissioner Federica Mogherini are
waging a multifaceted campaign to undermine and discredit one of Trump’s
most significant foreign policy initiatives: namely, Jerusalem.

As French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel beat a path for the White House in back-to-back visits this week,
the media coverage of U.S. – European Union relations is focused on
efforts to convince President Donald Trump to keep faith with his
predecessor Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Left largely unreported is that while the European leaders are is
pressuring Trump to align his Iran policy with theirs, Macron, Merkel,
and European Union Foreign Policy Commissioner Federica Mogherini are
waging a multifaceted campaign to undermine and discredit one of Trump’s
most significant foreign policy initiatives: namely, Jerusalem.

Since last December 6, when Trump officially recognized that
Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and announced his intention to move the
U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Macron, Mogherini, and Merkel
have been leading a major effort to undermine his policy.

On May 14, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is set to lead a 250-member American delegation to
Jerusalem to participate in the opening of the U.S. embassy in Israel’s
capital. Forty lawmakers and other senior officials, reportedly
including President Trump’s senior advisors Ivanka Trump and Jared
Kushner, are also set to join. Vice President Mike Pence and UN
Ambassador Nikki Haley may join the delegation as well.

Merkel, Macron, and Mogherini lobbied hard to convince Trump not to
honor his campaign pledge to move the U.S. embassy to Israel’s capital.
All three warned that any change in U.S. policy on Jerusalem would
destabilize the region in a dramatic way. Yet, as the Meir Amit
Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center reported,
there was no significant increase in Palestinian violence against
Israel in the six months following Trump’s announcement over the six
months that preceded it.

When, unmoved by their fear-mongering, Trump went forward with his determination to recognize Jerusalem last December, Merkel, Macron, and Mogherini led the charge in condemning his move. Media reports indicate
that key Arab states Saudi Arabia and Egypt have prevented major
criticism of the U.S. move domestically. But in striking contrast, the
EU has gone to great lengths to keep the criticism on a high flame.

In late December, EU members France, Britain, the Netherlands, and
Sweden joined the other ten UN Security Council members – aside from the
U.S. – in voting in favor of
a draft resolution demanding that the U.S. cancel its recognition of
Jerusalem and retain its embassy in Tel Aviv. The U.S. stood alone in
opposing the resolution and vetoed it in a 14-1 vote.

Unperturbed by the veto and by Ambassador Haley’s angry reaction, two days later, led by France and Germany, 23 EU member states voted in favor of a General Assembly resolution declaring the U.S. policy “null and void.”

The U.S. is not without its allies in Europe.

Out of respect for the U.S., five EU member states — Romania, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Hungary, and Croatia — defied Brussels and abstained from voting in favor of the General Assembly resolution.

More significantly, in defiance of the EU’s position, Czech President Milos Zaman enthusiastically applauded Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem and said the Czech Republic would also move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital.

Last Thursday, Liviu Dragnea, the leader of Romania’s ruling Social Democratic party, told Romanian television outlet Antena3 that Romania would also relocate its embassy to Jerusalem.

“Yesterday the government adopted a memorandum deciding to start the
procedure to effectively move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,”
he said.

Mogherini and her colleagues were not amused. Israel Radio reported
Saturday that Mogherini berated Romanian President Klaus Ionhannis and
demanded that the government abrogate its decision. Israel Hayom reported that she acted in a similar fashion in meetings with Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis.

Mogherini’s strong-armed tactics brought results.

Hours after Dragnea’s announcement, Iohannis denied that Romania
intends to move its embassy to Jerusalem. On Friday, Babis said the
Czech Republic will not move its embassy to Jerusalem.

A few days before she put the screws on the Romanians and Czechs,
Mogherini attended the Arab League summit in Dahran, Saudi Arabia,
rallying the Arabs to stand against America’s decision to move the U.S.
embassy to Jerusalem.

Echoing the position of UNESCO — the UN’s cultural organization, which rejects any Jewish ties to the city that has served as the Jewish spiritual capital for more than 3,000 years — Mogherini said,
“As Europeans and Arabs we share in particular an interest in
preserving the unique status of our common Holy City, Jerusalem.”

In her speech to
the General Assembly following its adoption of the anti-American
resolution last December, Haley noted that President Trump’s decision to
move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem “reflects the will of the American
people and our rights as a nation to choose the location of our
embassy.” She deplored the General Assembly move to “single out” the
U.S. for “exercising our rights as a sovereign nation.”

Haley opened her speech by drawing a parallel between UN’s
institutional discrimination against Israel and its singling out the
U.S. for rebuke over its decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

The EU’s behavior has been particularly noteworthy in this regard.

The EU’s efforts to undermine American policy regarding Jerusalem are
not limited to anti-American votes at the UN, or bids to scuttle
support for the U.S. move among EU member states.

This week, the Israeli media reported that an EU-funded and
Israeli registered anti-Israel non-governmental organization (NGO)
called Ir Amim (City of Nations) has petitioned Israel’s High Court of
Justice to block the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. It has
listed the State Department as a defendant.

As NGO Monitor, an Israeli non-profit group that monitors anti-Israel Palestinian and Israeli NGOs, has documented, Ir Amim plays a major role in drafting the EU’s policy statements against Israeli sovereignty over Israel’s capital city.

NGO Monitor president Prof. Gerald Steinberg told Breitbart News that
the EU’s statements, which are uniformly hostile to Israel’s assertion
of its sovereignty over Jerusalem, “are taken almost word for word from
EU-funded Ir Amim reports.” (Read more here.)

Ir Amim’s petition asks the court to
block the embassy opening due to planning and building exemptions that
Israel provided the U.S. government to expedite construction activities
related to converting the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem into the U.S.
embassy. But while its formal argument is environmental and procedural,
in its public statements, Ir Amim insists that
its goal is political. So long as the U.S. does not open an embassy to
“Palestine,” in Jerusalem, it shouldn’t be permitted to open its embassy
to Israel in the city, according to Ir Amim.

Incidentally, Ir Amim’s position is also the EU’s position.

For years, the EU has been spending millions of euros annually to
fund the operations of anti-Israel NGOs. One of the major tactics these
groups use in their anti-Israel – and EU-funded – activities is
lawfare, and one of the favorite arenas for lawfare is Israel’s Supreme
Court.

Israel’s Supreme Court has always had an unusual amount of power.
Alone in the Western world, Israel’s Supreme Court sits as a court of
first and last resort for any complaints against any government action
that a petitioner claims is “unjust.” In the early 1990s, the Court
expanded its powers by deciding that even without any plausible legal
interest, petitioners could expect a ruling on the most political of
matters. At the same time, the Court determined that it had authority to
overturn parliamentary legislation that it found contradicted basic
legal principles — as decided by the judges.

The Court was well aware of the revolutionary nature of its seizure
of power. Justice Aharon Barak, later to become the radical President of
the Court, depicted the Court’s new approach as part of a
“constitutional revolution.”

Seizing on the opportunity to undermine Israeli policymaking that
Barak created, the EU began pouring millions and millions of dollars
into newly formed radical NGOs to finance their operations. Over the
years, EU-funded NGOs have turned to the High Court to undermine
government policies on everything from counter-terrorism, to immigration
policy, to land policy, and to enforcement of planning and zoning laws
and regulations.

The EU has hoped to undermine Israeli policy not just by changing its
results, but also by creating judicial roadblocks that would disrupt
Israeli decision-making and create a “blockage.”

While there is nothing new today about the EU’s practice of using the
unchecked power of Israel’s Supreme Court, it is remarkable that they
are exploiting it to try to subvert U.S. foreign policy.

As Prof. Eugene Kontorvich from Northwestern University, who directs
the International Law Department at Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem,
explains, “In this absurd lawsuit, an EU-funded organization is trying
to use Israeli courts to block the U.S.’s exercise of its core sovereign
prerogatives. In essense, EU agents are using the imperiousness of the
Israeli judicial system to block U.S. foreign policy with which it
happens to disagree.”

Kontorovich noted that “Ir Amin is almost certain to lose even in
Israeli courts.” But as Steinberg points out, the purpose of the
petition isn’t to block the embassy move, per se.

It is to embarrass the U.S.

“Let’s assume that the Court is wise enough to dismiss their petition, Steinberg begins, “Ir Amim still gets the publicity.

“This is about controlling the discourse about Jerusalem. Ir Amim
gets publicity that presents it as an Israeli NGO whose positions are
more legitimate than those of the Israeli government and, in this case,
more legitimate than the U.S. government,” he explains.

On Tuesday it was reported that
European pressure on the Trump administration to suffice with symbolic
changes to the nuclear deal with Iran while keeping the substance of the
agreement unchanged is making headway. President Trump is now weighing
good relations with Europe over the need to block Iran from acquiring
the means to wage nuclear war.

As he does so, the president should bear in mind that the same
European leaders that are calling for “unity” on Iran are carrying out a
multilayered campaign across several continents to undermine his most
significant foreign policy achievement since entering office. They are
seeking to undermine President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital.

Caroline GlickSource: http://carolineglick.com/europe-wants-unity-on-iran-but-undermines-trump-on-jerusalem/ Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.